Traditional selling, with its focus on demonstrating features and benefits, makes the job of sales in the 21st century tougher than ever. If there’s a single message that traditional salespeople need to grasp to break free form commoditization, it’s "your solution is not your customer/prospect’s problem."

Whether you’re a salesperson or an executive of a growing business, the second highest leverage activity you can undertake is to deepen and define the problem you solve. How do you do that? Begin by following these steps:

3. Identify the critical results these people are responsible or striving for. Critical results are the select few results that dominate your prospect’s focus and drive their success; they’re not the normal everyday objectives that occupy most of our time.

The more clearly you can define the problem, the more attractive you’ll be and the easier it will be to stand out. A commercial printing company we work with transformed their message from a solutions focus to a problem focus, and is now moving beyond commoditization. Here’s their “why:”

Mid-market companies don’t have access to the high quality, flexible enterprise printing capabilities that large companies have. This is forcing them to spend more time and money to achieve their target results, and to accept less-than-ideal production constraints.